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  Rules of the Road

  Lucian K. Truscott IV

  For those who were there when the phone didn’t ring.

  Kent Carroll

  Bob Gardner

  Mimi Irving

  John Lombardi

  John Prizer

  Tim Seldes

  Charles Thensted

  David Vaught

  Dan Wolf

  And, of course, Carolyn.

  IT WAS NINE A.M. on a bright, cold, late October morning, and the modified was right where he’d put it when he left home—how long ago was it? Could it be? Yeah, it was fifteen years ago on a morning just as cold and bright that he left for his first year of college. He zipped up his field jacket against the early morning chill and headed across the barnyard. It seemed like forever since he’d wrapped his hands around the smooth rubber of the modified’s steering wheel, laid his right foot against the firewall, and heard the roar of the big V-8 and the squeal of the tires. The modified was parked in the lean-to shed over on the north side of the chicken coop. As he crossed the barnyard, feet kicking up little puffs of dust in the well-trampled dirt, he could just make out the shape of the car through the slats of the coop. It looked a little dusty, but it was the old modified all right.

  Sam Butterfield, Jr., was in between—in between assignments, on his way from Germany to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. In between marriages, his first having dissolved in a sweat-pit of yuppie recriminations when he refused to quit the army to accompany his wife to New York when she graduated from law school and was recruited by a large law firm there. In between ranks—he had just made major, a rank in the army for which there was no command position. As a captain you commanded a company, and as a lieutenant colonel a battalion, but for majors there were only paper-pushing staff jobs and teaching assignments and public relations slots, four or five years behind a desk biding your time until the army figured you were old enough, or bored enough, to go back to the troops. Since Sam Butterfield had left his southern Illinois home those many years ago, he had graduated from ROTC at Southern Illinois University, been through Infantry Officer’s Basic, and Airborne, and Ranger schools at Fort Benning, Georgia. Then he spent two years out at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in command of an infantry platoon. He went through the Infantry Advance Course, he did a year on the DMZ in Korea while his wife was in her first year of law school, then he got a company command at Fort Carson, Colorado, where his wife completed law school. When the army told him he was headed next to a battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington, his wife laid down the law. Either he went with her for a job on Wall Street, or she was filing for divorce. Childless, with much pain but few regrets, it was over.

  Two years at Fort Lewis were followed by the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. From there, he went on to a company command in Germany and a subsequent promotion to major. Now came the dreaded mid-career downtime and its inevitable blues. Everybody suffered as a major. Though the jobs you were assigned gave you much to do, none of them meant a whole lot. How many motor pool efficiency surveys could you get excited about when you knew to begin with that motor pools weren’t very efficient and they weren’t going to get that way anytime soon? The same was true of the endless studies done by personnel officers (majors all) on the AWOL problem, studies that had begun in Hannibal’s day, every one of which had doubtlessly concluded over the centuries that yes, AWOL was a problem, and no, it wasn’t going away.

  So when Sam returned from Germany and walked in the front door of the family farmhouse, he was wearing the grim visage of a man nearing middle age who was all too well aware of the pitfalls ahead. Women, for one. Where in hell was he going to meet anyone at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one of those edge-of-the-earth military reservations conveniently located next to a strip of used car lots and fast food joints and little else? It even got down to where he would live. He was too old to camp out in the BOQ, Bachelor Officer Quarters, ineligible for all other on-post housing because of his obvious lack of wife and kids, and he didn’t really relish buying a house downtown (wherever the hell that was) and starting the whole lawn-mowing, chatting over the back fence, good-neighbor thing again. In Germany he’d spent most of his time in the field. At Leavenworth, his time had been taken up by studying large unit tactics and strategy, and since he was there only nine months, a furnished apartment sufficed. The truth was, for three years he had successfully put off the idea that it was time to start over, but time-in-grade, a receding hairline, and an increasingly sour outlook on life had caught up with him. Now he was ready to face the fact—that it was indeed time to start over—but he didn’t know where to begin. He hadn’t been home since he left the States for Germany, so he figured if he was going to start anywhere, it may as well be there.

  He had been away from southern Illinois for almost as many years as he had spent growing up there. It was good to be back on the family farm, but it was strange, too. He had watched his younger brother die in an equipment accident when they were just boys. They’d been plowing forty acres, converging on the middle of the field from opposite sides, each on his own tractor dragging a gang-plow at just under ten miles an hour. His brother was plowing along when the plow caught on a buried tree stump. The tractor snapped to a halt, reared straight up in the air and flipped over backwards, crushing him between the engine cover and the top of the plow. Sam stopped his tractor and ran the hundred yards of rich soil that separated them, but by the time he got there his brother’s eyes bulged out of their sockets and a soft gurgling came from his mouth, opened wide in a silent scream.

  They were three years apart, and though they had split chores on the farm pretty much evenly, Sam never really had the love of farming that came naturally to his younger brother. Tommy was one of those kids who took so naturally to dirt and grass and woods, it was hard to imagine him with anything but a hoe or a shotgun in his hand. While Sam had played Little League baseball and football in junior high, his brother had no interest in organized sports. Every day after school he did his chores and spent whatever time there was before dark hunting in the woods. It wasn’t ever spoken of out loud, but by the time Sam was thirteen and his brother ten, it was assumed that Tommy would become his father’s partner on the farm when he grew up. The next year his brother was killed, and still the subject of Sam remaining on the farm never came up. He took his savings and bought the frame and engine for the modified and began spending every afternoon in the shed building his race car. His father would pass the shed on his tractor as he came in from the fields in the evening, and inside the shed a dim light glowed and the sounds of grinders and sanders and air-hammers filled the still air. He knew.

  His father died of a heart attack in December of Sam’s junior year at college. He knew the pain it would cause his mother when he told her that he still intended to make the army his career. When he left the farm for the army he felt triple guilt: he was contributing to the demise of the family business, betraying the memory of his father and brother, and leaving his mother alone with seven hundred acres and no man in the house. Fifteen years had done little to dull the feeling. It bore against his heart like a fist and made him feel more than a little mean. His mother had kept the farm going by employing hired hands, sharecropping the rich lowlands, and leasing the less desirable land as pasture to a few local cattlemen, but farming was a man’s business, and the chicken coop and other outbuildings had a forlorn look about them, as if their weatherbeaten clapboards missed the attention they would have gotten if Sam
had taken up their care where his father had left off.

  He slipped the lock on the ancient shed door and pulled it open. She was covered with a sixteenth of an inch of good reddish-brown Illinois farm dust, but she was coal black and low to the ground and menacing as hell anyway. He stood in the doorway of the shed for a moment, staring at the modified, a low-slung open-wheel race car, the yellow-dog mutt of the dirt track circuit. The car was an amalgam of parts—a 320 small-block Chevy engine, body panels from a wrecked Gremlin, hand-formed sheet metal hood and sides—all lashed to an Olsen tubular steel racing frame and wrapped with four huge dirt-track tires that jutted from the Gremlin body like dark afterthoughts. He’d owned it since he was a kid of fourteen, drove it in races every weekend all the way through high school and college. Now he propped the shed door open with a piece of two-by-four and switched on the lights. In the yellow glow of the overhead spots, through two years of dust and neglect the big numerals “58” could be seen on the hood and doors. He had built the car from the wheels up in this very shed, sprayed the suspension flat black, welded the exhausts, fitted the oil-cooler, tuned the suspension, ground the valves, polished the ports, balanced the cam and the crank. In his late teens, he had practically lived in the shed. An old army cot still set up in the corner attested to that fact.

  Now he grabbed a bath towel from a bin against the wall and with long, slow strokes began rubbing away the dust. Through the slats in the side of the coop, he could hear a few dozen hens stirring and clucking. Outside, atop a fence post by the driveway, a big red and black rooster with tail feathers two feet long crowed at the rising sun.

  Slowly the depth of the shine in the black lacquer paint began to show. He tried to remember exactly … twelve, or was it thirteen coats of paint? Thirteen, hand rubbed between every coat. That was it. He’d decided thirteen was his lucky number, and all the guys down at the body shop teased him. Only a kid would figure thirteen to be lucky. They laughed at him. He had bit his lower lip and kept rubbing down the modified’s paint. He’d show them, he swore under his breath. And show them he had. He’d driven on dirt tracks in three states, all the way from southern Illinois, through Evansville and Terre Haute, Indiana, to the championships in Cincinnati, Ohio, and after six years of racing every summer, he held two regional titles and one state title, in Illinois, his home state. He was known in the region as the good-natured, clean-cut kid who drove that black modified like a rabid rat. He wanted those checkered flags, and by the time he was finished racing, he practically owned the flag in his racing class.

  Ah, if the boys down at the body shop could see him now, still rubbing the hand-formed hood of the race car with loving strokes of the cloth, bent over like a crooked question mark to reach the underside of the rocker panels, perched on two stacked milk crates to reach the center of the roof … rubbing, rubbing, still rubbing after all these years, and loving every minute of it, every swipe of the cloth, every square inch of the shiny black lacquer. It was as if the steel beneath his hand were alive, and in a way it was, for he’d given birth to it himself. Only people who raced cars or worked on race cars could understand his devotion to the old modified. Anybody else would write him off as crazy. Anybody else like … Betsy. What made him think of her right now, with the iron flanks of the modified beneath his hand?

  He smiled. He always smiled when he thought of Betsy. They had met his first year at Southern Illinois University and had gone steady thereafter. Everyone—Sam’s mother, her parents, all of their friends at school—always assumed that they would marry when they graduated. They talked about it—talked and talked and talked. But no amount of talk got them around the fact that Sam was heading into a career that meant constant reassignments and moving, and Betsy, a small-town girl, didn’t relish the notion of never really having a home she could call her own. When the time came to bid farewell to the farm and his hometown, he bid farewell to Betsy, too.

  He stopped for a moment to wipe his brow. A vigorous, if hardly youthful, countenance stared up at him from the shiny black hood of the modified—white sidewall sandy-colored rapidly receding hair, clean-shaven cheeks, the beginnings of a leave-time mustache darkening his upper lip, red sunburned skin. What, besides his advancing years, was putting that wrinkle in his brow, even as he stroked his beloved modified? Betsy. He shook his head, amazed. Coming home for a couple of weeks between assignments was having an effect on him he hadn’t counted on. The years since his divorce—three years of blind dates, recent divorcées, military nurses over in Germany, a fairly steady thing with a schoolteacher at Leavenworth—hadn’t been a social desert, but a string of indifferent relationships to which he paid marginal attention did not make a life.

  He unlatched the sheet metal cover over the engine. There, in all its black iron and anodized aluminum splendor, was the heart of the beast: a 302-cubic-inch Chevrolet V-8, bored and stroked to 320 cubic inches, the maximum allowed in the modified class. The engine had an Edelbrock intake manifold and a big oversize Holly 4-barrel carburetor up on top, Hedman headers jutting out the sides and disappearing beneath the side panels in a maze of twisted exhaust manifolding and collector boxes. It ran a Bosch magneto with a gold-tipped wiring harness, and a special plastic fan up front that feathered itself at high speed, thus allowing the engine to use less power to run it. But it was what you couldn’t see inside the engine that gave it the six hundred horsepower a dynamometer testing had said it had.

  The Chevy ran an Iskenderian cam and roller lifters. The intake and exhaust ports were bored and polished, and the entire engine had been disassembled, polished, balanced, and blueprinted, brought up to exact specifications. It ran a special racing crankshaft and titanium piston connecting rods and racing pistons machined on top to accept oversize valves. The big Chevy was basic American power, huge and heavy and sturdy. At full scream, it was loud and scary as hell. You put your foot on the gas and you stood on it and you held on for dear life because all those horses under that hood could speed you over a guard rail and up on your backside just as sure as they could head you for the checkered flag. Those big Chevy horses didn’t care where they went. They were there for only one purpose: to get there first.

  His love affair with the modified race car was one of the things that his parents had never really understood about him. As farmers, they couldn’t quite get the notion of strapping yourself in a big iron machine and going around and around in a circle until somebody waved a flag and it was over. All they saw was dust and noise and smoke. The acrid smell of burning oil filled his mother’s nose at every race, and though she was happy for her son, pleased at his expertise and thrilled when he won, none of it made a damn bit of sense to her.

  Sam finished wiping down the modified and climbed in through the driver’s window. There was no car interior to speak of. A roll cage enveloped the driver in tubular steel. He sat in a metal bucket seat facing an aluminum firewall, tachometer, oil pressure and water temperature gauges, accelerator pedal, clutch, brake, steering wheel with an engine kill switch mounted where the horn button should be. A red metal canister containing the Halogen fire extinguisher system sat to his right on the aluminum floor pan. He wondered if she’d start. He grabbed the wheel and hit the starter switch on the dash. The big engine cranked over slowly a couple of times, cranked faster, and caught. Silently he thanked his mother. She must have had the hired hand recharge the battery when Sam called to say he was coming home. The roar of the exhaust pipes shook the shed, and the chickens in the coop next door scrambled from their nests in a flurry of clucking and feathers. The rooster flew from his perch, landing in the barnyard at a dead run, disappearing around the corner of the barn. He let the engine warm up for a moment while he strapped himself into the bucket seat with his seat belt and shoulder harness. He grabbed the Hurst floor shifter, depressed the clutch, and slid her into first. He slipped the clutch and pulled the modified out of the shed into the morning sunlight. It was time for one last drive before he sold her later that day. One last
blast down the dirt roads and back lanes that bled through the surrounding hills like grass stains on an old pair of jeans.

  Come on baby, talk to me, take me through your paces, drift me through those curves, rock me baby, whisper six hundred horses in my ear, rub me through the floor through the seat with the sweet rumble of your headers, purr for me baby, tell me just one more time what it was truly like… .

  ***

  Three counties away in a sparsely furnished room, sunlight peeked around the frayed edges of a yellow window shade pulled down to the top edge of an ancient, wheezing air conditioner. No clutter. Bed, chair, writing desk, rag rug neatly centered in the middle of the room, pedestal sink against the far wall. The air conditioner slowed momentarily, as the building’s electrical system struggled under its morning load of lights and shavers and coffee pots. Not a sound. It was as if the room were unoccupied. Then, from beneath the undisturbed bed covers, a barely discernible figure stirred. Coughing, hacking. The covers were thrown back, revealing an arm so thin it looked like a stain on the fabric of the bedsheet. A man was lying in the hammocklike depression of the bed. Two-day stubble. Cheekbones that wouldn’t look out of place on a corpse. Small diagonal scar under the left eye. Eyebrows permanently cocked.

  A hand fumbled on the tiny bedside table, located the last cigarette in the pack, found lips, fumbled again for a match, lit up. Smoke exhaled into the dim, bare room. Two or three puffs. Hacking, coughing, rubbing of red-rimmed eyes. Anxious shiver of bony shoulders. A grunt. A pair of skinny, lily-white legs emerged from the covers. Feet slid into cheap rubber flip-flops. Head hung between legs for a moment, then rising slowly to face the day: Johnny Gee. He shuffled across the room to a cooler sitting under the desk, removed a beer, wiped it dry on his drawers, cracked it open, and took a long swig. This caused his left knee to twitch visibly, so he swigged again. And again. He shook the can, held it to his eye, looked into the pop-top. Empty. Squinting, he looked around the room. He’d lost something. Pulled back the covers on the bed, felt around. Opened a closet containing two pairs of pants, one pair of shoes, one suit. Ran through pants pockets, jacket pockets, toes of shoes. Nothing. Into the bathroom. Lifted lid of the toilet tank. There, taped to the underside of the lid, a wallet.